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Personally, I feel that a large part of this conversation is driven by overly focusing on presidential elections specifically, which I suspect is largely driven by the overwhelming media focus on presidential elections, as well as a tendency for people to imagine that they're more politically involved than they actually are. Practically speaking, a nationwide one-on-one election leaves almost no room for expressing particular issue preferences. But this isn't necessarily a problem, because major political shifts rarely start at the presidential level. If a large amount of voters all over the country strongly want something to happen (not just enough to say they want it in polls, but enough to actually factor it into their voting decisions), then you'll see large numbers of candidates who support that policy winning office at the lower levels of government. Local government, then state government, then the House, and then finally the Senate. A presidential candidate can get a pretty good sense of how widespread support is for an issue by looking at how voters all over the country are voting in other, non-presidential elections. Besides, in many cases, control of state governments and Congress is more important than the presidency, especially when it comes to domestic politics. People act like their only chance to impact anything is deciding whether or not to vote in presidential elections, and that's so profoundly wrong that I can only take it as un-serious. Shifting the national perspective on an issue takes a lot more work than just leaving the "president" section blank on your November ballot.
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Feb 13, 2024 22:01
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Gnumonic posted:You're equivocating here (and you basically admit it). I think you've completely missed the point of what I was saying. This is because you're mixing up two fundamentally separate questions: "who has the power to do X under the federal government?" and "how do we, the voters, express our political preferences and desires in a way noticeable and compelling to the people who have the power to do X?". This thread is about the latter, not the former. The Senate has a fair amount of leverage over the presidency when it comes to foreign policy matters, but the exact amount of power they have here isn't really important. What is important is that if American voters vote in 60+ senators who support policy X, even in this age of polarization, then it is very clear that a substantial chunk of the voting population across the entire country wants policy X. It's even helpfully broken down by state so the president can see if any particularly important swing states care about policy X. Even if the Senate doesn't have the power to directly impose policy X or otherwise force it on the president, such a clear and consistent demonstration of political support for X will send a message that a president will be hard-pressed to ignore. The upshot of this, of course, is that there are a lot more Congress members who go up for election in election years, and the fact that each individual member of Congress has a far smaller electorate (compared to the presidency, anyway) means that it's easier for outsider challengers to rise up and for a diverse set of opinions to have real shots at the office. This makes it a lot easier to tell what the people want, as it's possible to see how different issues are faring across hundreds of elections across the entire country, as opposed to one single nationwide election where it's impossible to tell which particular issues are motivating people's voting decisions. It's much like how the rise of Donald Trump was a direct result of several election cycles worth of far-right crazies winning the full support of the base and going on to topple a number of established Republicans in the House and even in the Senate, demonstrating that a substantial chunk of the voting population was deeply hungry for the style of politics that eventually became MAGA. The media usually treats it as though Trump was the one who changed the Republican Party, but it's really just the opposite - the Republican voters changed, and that's what provided the opening for Trump to get in there in the first place. While Trump did have some unique qualities of his own that allowed him to expand his appeal beyond the arch-conservatives, his core MAGA base were the same people who'd spent the last six-plus years primarying moderate Republican House and Senate members and replacing them with ridiculously fringe candidates, and his rise should be regarded as just another step on the path that the Tea Partiers had been blazing since the day Obama was elected.
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Feb 14, 2024 00:49
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hooman posted:Does the Party you are voting for draw a distinction between a vote and an endorsement? If you are voting for the party is there any impetus for that party to change any of the behaviours or policies, or is voting for them giving the party the go ahead to continue to behave in ways you find personally abhorrent? We have plenty of historical examples of individual politicians changing their stances despite not losing elections. One well-known example is Obama publicly opposing gay marriage in 2008, winning the election, and then supporting gay marriage in 2012. While there's been tons of commentary on Obama's change of positions and how calculated or authentic it might have been, the important part here is that he didn't need to personally lose an election in order to "evolve" his position. And while Obama himself didn't directly do anything related to gay marriage, both his Supreme Court nominations and his DoJ appointees supported gay marriage, something that would be unlikely to be true with McCain or Romney. Voting isn't the only way to send a message to politicians. There've been plenty of times, historically, where a politician changed their mind about something without having to lose an election first. But the polling is consistently showing that the issues people care most about are "the economy" and "immigration", so the natural takeaway of a Dem loss would be that the next Dem candidate needs to do more about the southern border and pray that they'll inherit a recovery from Trump. Presidential votes are, by nature, incapable of amounting to specific policy feedback, so you'll just get lumped in with the majority. And while the results of an election can certainly have a lot of persuasive power, who loses isn't nearly as important as who wins. If Biden wins against an socialist but loses against a fascist, the obvious takeaway won't be "clearly we need more socialism". Parties change their behaviors and policies when the individual politicians who make up that party either change their minds about what they want or . Political parties don't have minds of their own, they're organizations made up of people. Focusing on what "the party" does is often a mistake, one which hides the individual agency of people and makes the parties seem like unaccountable and unchangeable monoliths - rather than organizations primarily composed of people who have been elected to their positions. There's a reason GJB tells people to show up to their local party conventions every single time this subject comes up. Squall posted:Biden could get 1 vote or 100 million votes and the takeaway will be "drat we need someone more centrist" because that's always the takeaway. "drat, we need someone more centrist" would probably actually be a reasonable takeaway from Biden losing, because Biden has been well to the left of every Dem president in the last four decades. Clinton and Obama governed as centrists and won their second terms without too much trouble; if Biden ends up being a one-term president hated by progressives despite being way to the left of both Clinton and Obama, it wouldn't make much sense for the takeaway would be "we need to move even further left". Especially when you consider that one of the persistent problems Biden faced was that he was noticeably to the left of Congress, which meant that many of his more ambitious progressive programs weren't able to gain or maintain sufficient support in Congress. If leftists had been consistently winning state and Congressional elections all over the US to the point where Congress was dominated by leftists trying to drag Biden right, then yeah, it'd be reasonable to conclude that the people want leftism and that Biden was simply not left enough for them. But there's a distinct lack of evidence that the people are willing to turn out for progressivism. is pepsi ok posted:I don't think this is correct based on the conclusions of Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page's famous study on policy preferences vs policy outcomes. No discussion of the Gilens and Page study is complete without mentioning that their definition of "economic elites" was "people with an income above $160k", and their definition of "average citizens" was "people with an income below $160k". The problems with the former should be pretty obvious (it tags the "economic elite" as primarily being doctors and engineers, not billionaires). They didn't have any actual data on the preferences of the true economic elites, so they substituted "affluent Americans" instead, with the assumption that the preferences of the merely affluent would reflect those of the true elite. But the problems with the latter are actually far more important. Rebuttal papers that broke the Gilen/Page study's data down further found that middle-income Americans agree with affluent Americans on most issues, and on the very few issues on which they disagree it's basically a coin-flip which way the result will go. Ultimately, what they found was that the really disadvantaged group was the poorest Americans who make well under the median income, who often faced middle-income and upper-income Americans teaming up against them. That's just one of the many criticisms that have been leveled against the Gilens and Page paper, too. Other issues include failing to measure the actual strength of each group's support for a policy and failing to account for the significant status-quo bias in US politics. Gilen and Page's claims have a lot of holes, which (as far as I can tell) they've failed to sufficiently fill in with their own responses and later work.
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Feb 14, 2024 20:55
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hooman posted:I don't diagree with anything you have said here. However this is another post responding to me with things that are likely correct in the context of the US presidential election that is walking around my point that withdrawing your vote will create change in the party as a whole by changing the views of the individuals within it. I agree that change can happen within a structure in other ways, however vote withdrawl does also create change. Whether that change is long term positive or negative, short term positive or negative is a judgement for an individual. You are once again making the massive mistake of focusing exclusively on a single election, to the exclusion of all the rest. I'm not super duper familiar with the Corbyn drama as a whole, but I do know that talking about a successful insurgent left-wing candidate - in other words, one single successful left-wing candidate - is not impressive. You don't get leftism by electing one single leftist to the top slot. You get leftism by electing leftists to all the slots, or at least a comfortable majority of slots. This sounds like the same problem that happens in the US - people focus overwhelmingly on the one seat at the very top that gets all the media attention, while largely ignoring the hundreds of other party seats that hold significant power. A hundred Starmerites can purge twenty Corbynites, but twenty Starmerites can't purge a hundred Corbynites. By comparison, Tony Blair's power wasn't really established by winning the Labour leadership election in 1994. Instead, it was established by leading the party to an enormous victory in 1997. That not only proved the popularity of his stances and brought hope to a party that had been devastated by Thatcher's repeated landslide victories, but also filled the ranks of the party with more than a hundred freshly-elected Blairites, solidly cementing his dominance over Labour. Moreover, he was able to keep delivering those victories for the party in subsequent elections, making him one of the longest-serving Prime Ministers since the birth of Queen Victoria, almost equaling Thatcher's own successes. He was only ousted when he was no longer able to deliver those landslide victories.
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Feb 15, 2024 08:13
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hooman posted:It's really interesting that you make this criticism (focusing on a single example) when you initially used Obama specifically as an example of change happening without election loss. In fact, if you look at my posts in this thread, this is literally the first post in which I have used any election specifics. So saying I am once again making the massive mistake is entirely mischaracterising my posts, please be more accurate. I used Obama (an individual politician) as an example of how individual politicians can change their stances based on factors besides their own personal electoral performance. It's completely consistent, because I'm talking about how political parties are groups of individuals, and the various ways in which those individuals can be influenced or replaced in large enough numbers to affect the course of the party as a whole. You've said it yourself - the existing MPs of the party didn't support Corbyn. Which indicates that even though Corbyn was able to muster enough votes to win the leadership election, he was not able to channel that into gains for leftist MPs in general. It's a lot like how a Bernie Sanders presidency would have been generally lovely, because there were hardly any leftists in the Senate and the Bernie movement wasn't really making any effort to change that, so Sanders wouldn't have been able to get his desired policies passed into law because the left hadn't built the groundwork before making a play for the top position. Corbyn was the Barry Goldwater to Blair's Ronald Reagan. Goldwater, like Corbyn, was personally popular with the base due to his charismatic radicalism, but was unable to channel that into broad electoral appeal or any immediate shift in the position of the party as a whole. On the other hand, Reagan, like Blair, was able to deliver massive electoral landslides for his party, allowing him to reshape the party as he liked while his foes didn't dare to oppose him. Whether the policies are good or bad is, for the purposes of this thread, besides the point. The fact of the matter is that Margaret Thatcher was the longest-serving Prime Minister since 1850, primarily due to her ability to deliver massive electoral landslides for her party, and that Blair was the second-longest-serving Prime Minister since 1850, once again due to his ability to deliver massive electoral landslides for his party. Thatcherite economics didn't become dominant because of Thatcher or Blair, they became dominant because Thatcherite economics and the politicians that supported them were popular with the electorate, which manifested itself in the form of massive electoral successes for politicians who adopted those policies. While Corbyn may have been personally popular, that did not translate into a massive wave of Corbynite MPs sweeping into power at the next election, and so his attempts to singlehandedly do a 180 on many party positions (such as trying to become a champion of Brexit) went poorly.
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Feb 15, 2024 20:05
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soviet elsa posted:Is this the correct thread to complain about election discourse? Like specifically the only presidential election I was allowed to vote in was 2020, only presidential vote I've cast was Bernie in the primary and I'm not about to change it this year, please don't think I want to talk anyone into voting Joe Biden. I vote blue no matter who downhill to avoid the Bring Back Slavery And Legalize Hunting Trans People For Sport Party taking over the city council and school board and I'm proud of it. If you're tired of seeing stupid hot takes from old Twitter dumbasses, stop reading Twitter. You're doing this to yourself!
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Feb 25, 2024 00:04
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Josef bugman posted:They should because it is a large and untapped market. They don't because, in general, it's considered better from an internal perspective to try to change other voters to your teams side. The problem with that is that polarization of political norms continues apace and it is no longer a thing you can really do, but instead of expanding to get votes from people outside of that paradigm or to try and bring disaffiliating or none voters into the party the same people keep trying to poach other voters over and over again. There's no evidence that the pro-Palestine movement is a large and untapped market, and lots of historical evidence that it isn't. That might be in the process of changing right now in 2024, but we shouldn't really act shocked that politicians aren't all rushing to upend their entire party platforms for the sake of a political movement that barely even existed six months ago. The reason that they don't expand their policies to get votes from non-voters is that there's not much evidence that non-voters are withholding their votes because of specific policy things, and there's not much evidence that policy changes will get those non-voters to come out and vote. At least if someone's already voting for the other party, you know they care about politics or policies. Non-voters are less engaged, less likely to pay attention to politics, less likely to believe that politics has any effect on them personally, and less likely to feel that voting will have any impact at all on politics. Getting them to come out to vote is a lot more difficult than just adjusting your policy slate a bit. hooman posted:I'm going to try and respond to both of these at once since I think maybe I'm not being clear about what I am talking about. The aim is not to change the minds of the people who currently lead/run/represent the party as I am taking as read that as voters without large amounts of lobbying money that is practically impossible. Instead the goal is to ensure that the members who are elected as part of the party are ones who you agree with. That means being involved in primary processes, trying to get good candidates in, as well as not voting for poo poo ones. There's another reason that electing a single voice that agrees with you is not going to work: the fact that passing a law requires roughly 269 people to approve of it. I don't know how it works in whichever country you're in, but hyperfocusing on a single seat to the exclusion of all others fundamentally does not make sense in the American system. In order to get the policies you want, you need to flip a lot of seats, because American politicians are largely individuals that the party leadership has very limited power to pressure. The focus on the presidency over everything is a result of modern media more than anything. While the presidency is the most powerful single position, it's still very limited in what it can actually do without the support of the other branches. However, a single national election that everyone votes in makes for a more profitable audience for national mass media than hundreds of state and district races do, so that gets a wildly disproportionate focus. Putting that aside, I think the big disconnect I'm seeing in your overall strategy here is that you're treating "agreement" as a binary yes/no thing. Either you agree with a politician or you don't. But in reality, that's not how things work. There are a lot of political issues that a politician will have a stance on, and typically you'll agree with them on some of those issues while disagreeing with them on others. Because of the sheer number of political issues and positions, it's extremely unlikely that you'll ever have the opportunity to vote for a candidate who agrees with you on 100% of issues, unless you're a single-issue voter who only cares about one issue and none of the others. It's far more likely that you'll be choosing between a candidate who agrees with you on 80% of issues or a candidate that agrees with you on 5% of issues. If the candidate who agrees with you on 80% of issues wins, then both they and other politicians will be more likely to continue holding policy positions you agree with, which makes it more likely that you'll see candidates agreeing with you on 83% or 85% of issues in the future. Of course, it's also possible that you might see some candidates who only agree with you on 78% or 75% of the issues. But even that's still clearly better than if victory goes to the candidate who agrees with you on 5% of issues.
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Feb 25, 2024 22:01
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